In May 1939, the Ravensbruck labour camp for women was founded in Germany. The only camp of its kind, Ravensbruck was designed to hold 15,000 prisoners, and eventually housed over 42,000 women from 23 countries. But who, Judith Buber Agassi asks, were they? "Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbruck" offers insight into the identities of the women within Ravensbruck's walls, presenting original research from major archives in Germany, Israel and the USA. The author has recovered the identity of over 16,000 Jewish women over the six year history of the camp, drawing data from transport and death registration lists, as well as from records that were smuggled out of the camp before liberation, all double-checked, where possible, with personal testimonies. Unlike many Ravensbruck memoirs, these testimonies are intended to corroborate details, rather than produce an impressionistic account of camp life. And yet, Buber Agassi's laboriously constructed data is no dispassionate array of facts: at the very heart of her work is the quest to give the dignity of an identity - a memory - to thousands of women.

After the Holocaust. The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience.

Since the beginning of the "War on Terror," Israel has become increasingly salient to imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies toward the Palestinians. In this context, a key ideological weapon is the cynical accusation of "anti-Semitism." For historical reasons, this has been deployed most forcefully in France, and Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan caustically demolish the "anti-Semitism is everywhere" allegation, used to bludgeon opponents of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the banlieue youth. Ivan Segre undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant "reactionary philo-Semitism" that identifies Jewish interests with the "democratic West." Segre's concern is to uphold a universalist position and to defend Jewish tradition from Zionist ideological distortion.

Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.

In this book Yehuda Bauer, an internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian recounts the destruction of the shtetls, small Jewish townships in what was the eastern part of Poland, by the Nazis in 1941-1942. Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls. In line with his belief that 'history is the story of real people in real situations', Bauer tells moving stories about what happened to individual Jews and their communities. Over a million people, approximately a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust came from the shtetls. Bauer writes of the relations between Jews and non-Jews (including the actions of rescuers); he describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, some people's escape to the forests, and Jewish participation in the Soviet partisan movement. Bauer's book is a definitive examination of the demise of the shtetls, a topic of vast importance to the history of the Holocaust.

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards - committed to restoring freedom and honour to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another - against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to secure Dreyfus' conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In "Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters", the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honour.

This Very Short Introduction examines and untangles the various strands of antisemitism seen throughout history, from medieval religious conflict to 'new' antisemitism in the 21st century. Steven Beller reveals how the phenomenon grew as a political and ideological movement in the 19th century, how it reached it its dark apogee in the worst genocide in modern history - the Holocaust - and how antisemitism still persists around the world today.

"Surviving the Holocaust" is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author's father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author's uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army. As an exemplary 'theorized life history,' "Surviving the Holocaust" applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers' lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck, it highlights the prewar experiences, agentive decision-making and risk-taking, and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. "Surviving the Holocaust" also shows how one family's memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities, including nations-states and their institutions, and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning.

The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

"The Crime of My Very Existence" investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on "Jewish criminality" from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.

This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.

Offenders or Victims? German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism

Anti-Semitism is generally thought to derive from chimerical images of Jews, who became the victims of these projections. Some scholars, however, allege that the Jews' own conduct was the main cause of the hatred directed toward them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Olaf Blaschke takes up this provocative question by considering the tensions between German Catholicism and Judaism in the period of the Kulturkampfe.

Did Catholic resentments merely construct 'their' secular Jew? Or did their anti-Semitism in fact derive from their perceptions of the conduct of liberal Jewish 'offenders' during a period of social stress? Blaschke's deeper look at this crucial period of German history, particularly as revealed in the Catholic and Jewish presses, provides new and sometimes surprising insights.

The Holocaust is frequently depicted in isolation by its historians. Some of them believe that to place it in any kind of comparative context risks diminishing its uniqueness and even detracts from the enormity of the Nazi crime. In reality, such a restricted understanding of 'uniqueness' has pulled the Holocaust apart from history and set up barriers to a better understanding of the racial onslaught unleashed within the Third Reich and its conquered territories. Working against the grain of much earlier writing, this innovative new history combines a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of the Jews, a full consideration of Nazi policies against other population groups, and a comparative analysis of other modern genocides. The Holocaust is portrayed as the culmination of a much wider history of European genocide and ethnic cleansing, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Ultimately, Bloxham shows that an explanation for the Holocaust rooted exclusively in Nazism and antisemitism is inadequate when set against one that is both prepared to give due weight to the immediate circumstances of the Second World War in eastern Europe and to situate the Jewish genocide within the broader patterns of human behaviour in the late-modern world.

This volume is the twenty-sixth in the Holocaust Studies Series sponsored by the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It contains ten seminal studies the catastrophe that befell the Jews of Europe during the Nazi era. It also reprints two historically crucial documents relating to the so-called Hungarian Gold Train, a freight train that, in 1944, carried stolen or confiscated Jewish valuables from Hungary. Essays recount the unfolding of the Holocaust in Hungary and the history of the Jews in Europe. They detail the elimination of Jews in Greece, particularly from the large Sephardic community of Salonika, and describe the rescue of Jews in Albania. Nonhistorical essays concern autobiographical narratives in which survivors and their descendents reflect on the return to former shtetls in East Central Europe and the attitudes of victims toward the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes. Taken altogether, this volume formulates a more complete understanding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

The Shoah in Ukraine. History, Testimony, Memorialization. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, Ukraine was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe. Between 1941 and 1944, some 1.4 million Jews were killed there, and one of the most important centers of Jewish life was destroyed. Yet, little is known about this chapter of Holocaust history. Drawing on archival sources from the former Soviet Union and bringing together researchers from Ukraine, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, The Shoah in Ukraine sheds light on the critical themes of perpetration, collaboration, Jewish-Ukrainian relations, testimony, rescue, and Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine. Contributors are Andrej Angrick, Omer Bartov, Karel C. Berkhoff, Ray Brandon, Martin Dean, Dennis Deletant, Frank Golczewski, Alexander Kruglov, Wendy Lower, Dieter Pohl, and Timothy Snyder.

How did the levels of anti-Semitism in the 1930s compare to those of earlier decades? Did anti-Semitism vary in content and intensity across societies? In other words, were Germans more anti-Semitic than their European neighbors, and, if so, why? How does anti-Semitism differ from other forms of religious, racial, and ethnic prejudice? In this 2003 book, William I. Brustein offersa truly systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism within Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein proposes that European anti-Semitism flowed from religious, racial, economic, and political roots, which became enflamed by economic distress, rising Jewish immigration, and socialist success. To support his arguments, Brustein draws upon a careful and extensive examination of the annual volumes of the American Jewish Year Books and more than 40 years of newspaper reportage from Europe's major dailies. The findings of this informative book offer a fresh perspective on the roots of society's longest hatred.

Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. These families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of them pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their 'racial' status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna's intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment.

Modern day Israel, and the Jewish community, is strongly influenced by the memory and horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust. Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost the ability to trust itself, its neighbors or the world around it. He shows that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own intimate family history to inform his innovative views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in world at large. Thought-provoking, compelling, and original, this book is bound to spark a heated debate around the world.

The notorious concentration camp system was a central pillar of the Third Reich, supporting the Nazi war against political, racial and social outsiders. Established during the first months of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, several million men, women and children of many nationalities had been incarcerated in the camps by the end of the Second World War. At least two million lost their lives. This innovative volume offers the first overview of the recent scholarship that has changed the way the camps are studied over the last two decades. Examining such topics as the earliest camps, the 'forgotten' camps in Eastern Europe, issues of gender and commemoration, this book provides a critical guide to the current historiography of the camps.

Since Polish Catholics embraced some anti-Jewish notions and actions prior to WWII, many intertwined the Nazi death camps in Poland with Polish anti-Semitism. As a result, more so than local non-Jewish population in other Nazi-occupied countries, Polish Catholics were considered active collaborators in the destruction of European Jewry. Through the presentation of these negative images in Holocaust literature, documentaries, and teaching, these stereotypes have been sustained and infect attitudes toward contemporary Poland, impacting on Jewish youth trips there from Israel and the United States. This book focuses on the role of Holocaust-related material in perpetuating anti-Polish images and describes organizational efforts to combat them. Without minimizing contemporary Polish anti-Semitism, it also presents more positive material on contemporary Polish-American organizations and Jewish life in Poland. To our knowledge this will be the first book to document systematically the anti-Polish images in Holocaust material, to describe ongoing efforts to combat these negative stereotypes, and to emphasize the positive role of the Polish Catholic community in the resurgence of Jewish life in Poland. Thus, this book will present new information that will be of value to Holocaust Studies and the 100,000 annual foreign visitors to the German death camps in Poland.

Christ Killers. The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen

The New Testament accounts of Jesus' crucifixion have stood at the bedrock of Christianity since it's birth in the 1st century, and they remain among the essential foundations of Western culture in the 21st. These Gospel narratives of the Passion - the arrest, trial, scourging, and execution of Jesus - cast the Jews as those responsible, directly and indirectly, for the death of their Messiah and the son of God.

Cohen tracks the image of the Jew as the murderer of the Messiah and God from its origins to its most recent expressions. A great deal has been written about Christian anti-Semitism, its roots, and its horrific consequences in world history. This is the first book, however to focus on the powerful myth that has driven so much murderous hatred. An important addition to the literature on Jewish-Christian relations, it should appeal to a wide variety of readers in both communities.

This book argues that although anti-semitism is an evil, it has paradoxically kept Judaism alive and helped its culture flourish, and been a positive force in Jewish life. As anti-semitism has diminished, the Jewish community has lost its way in the unceasing quest for social and political acceptance. As a pariah people, divided from the gentile world through prejudice and misunderstanding, Jewry saw itself as a separate and alien community. Paradoxically, it is anti-semitism which has ensured its survival rather than threatening its existence. Now, as a result of social acceptance, the Jewish community throughout the English-speaking world is undergoing a transformation. Jews have ceased to be dedicated to the Jewish heritage and the Jewish community in chaos. No longer is Judaism a unified tradition, providing a solid foundation for the Jewish people. The book points to a series of historical examples illustrating the author's thesis - ways in which antipathy to Jews and Judaism stimulated Jewish life and thought.

This book argues that although anti-semitism is an evil, it has paradoxically kept Judaism alive and helped its culture flourish, and been a positive force in Jewish life. As anti-semitism has diminished, the Jewish community has lost its way in the unceasing quest for social and political acceptance. As a pariah people, divided from the gentile world through prejudice and misunderstanding, Jewry saw itself as a separate and alien community. Paradoxically, it is ant-isemitism which has ensured its survival rather than threatening its existence. Now, as a result of social acceptance, the Jewish community throughout the English-speaking world is undergoing a transformation. Jews have ceased to be dedicated to the Jewish heritage and the Jewish community in chaos. No longer is Judaism a unified tradition, providing a solid foundation for the Jewish people. The book points to a series of historical examples illustrating the author's thesis - ways in which antipathy to Jews and Judaism stimulated Jewish life and thought.

This is a multi-perspectival, broadly thematic exploration of ghettoization and deportation in Hungary as spatio-temporal processes, integrating the so-called 'spatial turn' in the humanities into Holocaust Studies. 'The universe began shrinking,' wrote Elie Wiesel of his Holocaust experiences in Hungary, 'first we were supposed to leave our towns and concentrate in the larger cities. Then the towns shrank to the ghetto, and the ghetto to a house, the house to a room, the room to a cattle car...' Wiesel's words point to the Holocaust being implemented and experienced as a profoundly spatial event, with Jews concentrated in urban centres in more and more confined space. But alongside this spatial story of increasing physical concentration (segregation and control), is a spatio-temporal story of the Holocaust experienced as movement (to and from ghettos and camps) and stasis (in ghettos and cattle cars) which Wiesel hints at. Both ideas underlie this book on ghettoization and deportation in Hungary as spatio-temporal processes. Using a multi-perspectival, broadly thematic approach, Dr Tim Cole's "Traces of the Holocaust" sees him innovatively explore ways of integrating the so-called 'spatial turn' in the humanities into Holocaust Studies.

A World Without Jews. The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

Why exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years.

The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves - where they came from and where they were heading - and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration - and justification - for Kristallnacht. As Germans imagined a future world without Jews, persecution and extermination became imaginable, and even justifiable.

Alon Confino is professor in the department of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben Gurion University, Israel. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Robbing the Jews, the Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945

Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property; the book demonstrates the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe, the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based on indigenous antisemitism and plans for ethnically homogenous nation-states. In the occupied East, property was collected at the killing sites - the most valuable objects were sent to Berlin, whereas items of lesser value supported the local administration and rewarded collaborators. At several key junctures, robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, accelerating the progression from pogrom to mass murder.

Speaking and understanding can both be thought of as forms of translation, and in this way every speaker is an exile in language—even in one's mother tongue. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the testimonies of the German Jews and their relation with the German language, Jacques Derrida’s confrontation with Hannah Arendt, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Donatella Ester Di Cesare proclaims Auschwitz the Babel of the twentieth century. She argues that the globalized world is one in which there no longer remains any intimate place or stable dwelling. Understanding becomes a kind of shibboleth that grounds nothing, but opens messianically to a utopia yet to come.

SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, State University of New York Press, 2012, geb, 272 pp, € 72.50, 9781438442532

Of one-and-a-half million surviving photographs related to Nazi concentration camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers.

Images in Spite of All reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clandestinely by one of the Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities there, were made as a potent act of resistance. Available today because they were smuggled out of the camp and into the hands of Polish resistance fighters, the photographs show a group of naked women being herded into the gas chambers and the cremation of corpses that have just been pulled out.

Georges Didi-Huberman's relentless consideration of these harrowing scenes demonstrates how Holocaust testimony can shift from texts and imaginations to irrefutable images that attempt to speak the unspeakable. Including a powerful response to those who have criticized his interest in these images as voyeuristic, Didi-Huberman's eloquent reflections constitute an invaluable contribution to debates over the representability of the Holocaust and the status of archival photographs in an image-saturated world.

We Remember With Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962

It has become an accepted truth: after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis. Whether motivated by fear, shame, or the desire to assimilate, the Jewish community in the United States simply did not memorialize the Holocaust until the Eichmann trial and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War made it socially acceptable for them to do so. In a compelling work sure to draw fire from academics and pundits alike, Hasia R. Diner shows this assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances - in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms - "We Remember with Reverence and Love" shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in post-war America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish 'forgetfulness,' she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy.

The Holocaust and the Postmodern argues that postmodernism, especially understood in the light of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is a response to the Holocaust. This way of thinking offers new perspectives on Holocaust testimony, literature, historiography, and post-Holocaust philosophy. While postmodernism is often derided for being either playful and superficial or obscure and elitist, this book argues and demonstrates its commitment both to the past and to ethics.

Dealing with Holocaust testimony, including the work of Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel, with the memoirs of "second generation" survivors and with recent Holocaust literature, including Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and the false memoir of "Benjamin Wilkomirski," Eaglestone argues for a new way of reading both Holocaust testimony and Holocaust fiction. Through an exploration of Holocaust historiography, the book offers a new approach to debates over truth and memory. Eaglestone argues for the central importance of the Holocaust in understanding the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and goes on to explore what the Holocaust means for rationality, ethics, and for the idea of what it is to be human. Weaving together theory and practice, testimony, literature, history, philosophy, and Holocaust studies, this interdisciplinary book is the first to explore in detail the significance of the Holocaust for postmodernism, and the significance of postmodernism for understanding the Holocaust.

Church, Nation and Race. Catholics and antisemitism in Germany and England (1918 -1945)

Church, nation and race compares the worldviews and factors that promoted or, indeed, opposed antisemitism amongst Catholics in Germany and England after the First World War.

As a prequel to books on Hitler, fascism and genocide, the book turns towards ideas and attitudes that preceded and shaped the ideologies of the 1920s and 1940s. Apart from the long tradition of Catholic anti-Jewish prejudices, the book discusses new and old alternatives to European modernity offered by Catholics in Germany and England. Numerous events in the interwar years provoked anti-Jewish responses among Catholics: the revolutionary end of the war and financial scandals in Germany; Palestine and the Spanish Civil War in England. At the same time the rise of fascism and National Socialism gave Catholics the opportunity to respond to the anti-democratic and antisemitic waves these movements created in their wake.

Church, nation and race is a political history of ideas that introduces Catholic views of modern society, race, nation and the 'Jewish question'. It shows to what extent these views were able to inform political and social activity. This study will interest academics and students of antisemitism, European history, German and British history.

Traumatic Encounters argues for an alternative memorial path in Holocaust and cultural studies--one that shows the vital necessity of thinking in a universal way about an event like the Holocaust. Relying on Hegel's notion that the particular is already universal, Eisenstein shows how the encounter with trauma transpires not in the refusal of a universalizing gesture but rather in its wholesale embrace. This embrace results in a recognition involving the trauma that conditions the possibility of history in the first place--a structural trauma immune to historicization that Hegel and psychoanalysis place at the heart of subjectivity and community. This encounter with structural trauma is at the center of four titles that Eisenstein examines: Spielberg's Schindler's List, D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and David Grossman's See Under: Love

The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers.

The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of the victims of Nazi racial policies in this area. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war.

This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.

This is the story of the reemergence of the Jewish community in Germany after its near total destruction during the Holocaust. In western Germany, the community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting. In eastern Germany, the small Jewish community struggled against communist opposition. After coalescing, both Jewish communities, largely isolated by the international Jewish community, looked to German political leaders and the two German governments for support. Through relationships with key German leaders, they achieved stability by 1953, when West Germany agreed to pay reparations to Israel and to individual Holocaust survivors and East Germany experienced a wave of antisemitic purges. Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Geller elucidates the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders.

November 9th 1938 is widely seen as a violent turning point in Nazi Germany's assault on the Jews. An estimated 400 Jews lost their lives in the anti-Semitic pogrom and more than 30,000 were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps, where many were brutally mistreated. Thousands more fled their homelands in Germany and Austria, shocked by what they had seen, heard and experienced. What they took with them was not only the pain of saying farewell but also the memory of terrible scenes: attacks by mobs of drunken Nazis, public humiliations, burning synagogues, inhuman conditions in overcrowded prison cells and concentration camp barracks. The reactions of neighbours and passersby to these barbarities ranged from sympathy and aid to scorn, mockery, and abuse. In 1939 the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne gathered eyewitness accounts of the Kristallnacht from hundreds of Jews who had fled, but Hartshorne joined the Secret Service shortly afterwards and the accounts he gathered were forgotten - until now. These eyewitness testimonies - published here for the first time, with a foreword by Saul Friedlander, the Pulitzer Prize historian and Holocaust survivor - paint a harrowing picture of everyday violence in one of Europe's darkest moments. This unique and disturbing document will be of great interest to anyone interested in modern history, Nazi Germany and the historical experience of the Jews.

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas

This volume expands the intellectual exchange between researchers working on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust life and North American sociologists working on collective memory, diaspora, transnationalism, and immigration. The collection is comprised of two types of essays: primary research examining the Shoah and its aftermath using the analytic tools prominent in recent sociological scholarship, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in sociology and related fields.

Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielberg's collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering.

This interdisciplinary collection of primary and secondary readings encourages scholars and students to engage critically with current debates about the origins, implementation and postwar interpretation of the Holocaust. Interdisciplinary content encourages students to engage with philosophical, political, cultural and literary debate as well as historiographical issues. It integrates oral histories and testimonies from both victims and perpetrators, including Jewish council leaders, victims of ghettos and camps, SS officials and German soldiers. Subsections can be used as the basis for oral or written exercises. Whole articles or substantial extracts are included wherever possible.

The graphic history of the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe during the Second World War is illustrated in this series of 333 detailed maps. The maps, and the text and photographs that accompany them, powerfully depict the fate of the Jews between 1933 and 1945, while also setting the chronological story in the wider context of the war itself. The maps include: historical background - from the effects of anti-Jewish violence between 1880 and 1933 to the geography of the existing Jewish communities before the advent of the Nazis the beginning of the violence - from the destruction of the synagogues in November 1938 to Jewish migrations and deportations, the ghettos, and the establishment of the concentration camps and death camps throughout German-dominated Europe the spread of Nazi rule - the fate of the Jews throughout Europe including Germany, Austria, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Russia, Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Baltic States Jewish revolts and resistance - acts of armed resistance, fighting in the forests, individual acts of courage Jews in hiding - escape routes, Christians who helped Jews the death marches - the advance of the Allies and the liberation of the camps, the survivors, and the final death toll. This revised edition includes a new section which gives an insight into the layout and organization of some of the most significant places of the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto, maps that will be especially useful to those visiting the sites.

Stolen Words is an epic story about the largest collection of Jewish books in the world - tens of millions of books that the Nazis looted from European Jewish families and institutions. Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied Jewish communal libraries, confiscated volumes from government collections, and stole from Jewish individuals, schools, and synagogues. Early in their regime the Nazis burned some books in spectacular bonfires, but most they saved, stashing the literary loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts, and warehouses throughout Europe. It was the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in history.

After the war, Allied forces discovered these troves of stolen books but quickly found themselves facing a barrage of questions. How could the books be identified? Where should they go? Who had the authority to make such decisions? Eventually the military turned the books over to an organization of leading Jewish scholars called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. - whose chairman was the acclaimed historian Salo Baron and whose on-the-ground director was the philosopher Hannah Arendt - with the charge to establish restitution protocols.

Stolen Words is the story of how a free civilization decides what to do with the material remains of a world torn asunder, and how those remains connect survivors with their past. It is the story of Jews struggling to understand the new realities of their post-Holocaust world and of Western society's gradual realization of the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II. Most of all, it is the story of people - of Nazi leaders, ideologues, and Judaica experts; of Allied soldiers, scholars, and scoundrels; and of Jewish communities, librarians, and readers around the world.

The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union

This book represents comprehensive research into the world's Jewish press during the Second World War and explores its stance in the face of annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime in Europe. The research is based on the major Jewish newspapers that were published in four countries - Palestine, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union - and in three languages - Hebrew, Yiddish and English.
The Jewish press frequently described the situation of the Jewish people in occupied countries. It urged the Jewish leaders and institutions to act in rescue of their brethren. It protested vigorously against the refusal of the democratic leadership to recognize that the Jewish plight was unique because of the Nazi intention to annihilate Jews as a people. Yosef Gorny argues that the Jewish press was the persistent open national voice fighting on behalf of the Jewish people suffering and perishing under Nazi occupation.

We Wept Without Tears. Testimonies of the Jewish Sondernkommando from Auschwitz

The Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be the "members of staff" of the Nazi death-factory. This book, translated for the first time into English from its original Hebrew, consists of interviews with the very few surviving Sonderkommandos, men who witnessed at first hand the unparalleled horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some of these men had never spoken of their experiences before. Over a period of years, Gideon Greif interviewed intensively all Sonderkommando survivors living in Israel. They describe not only the specific technical details of the German-Nazi killing programme but also the moral and human challenges they faced while fulfilling their appalling work. The book provides direct testimony about the "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem", but it is also a unique document on the boundless cruelty and deceit practised by the Germans on their victims. It documents the helplessness and powerlessness of the one-and-a-half million people, 90 percent of them Jews, who were brutally murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. "This is a book that must be read by all who dare draw close to the killing, those who dare to come close - as close as non-survivors can come - to the inferno." Michael Berenbaum

Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation

Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Poles were killed. Of these, more than half were Jews killed in the Holocaust. Ninety percent of the world's second largest Jewish community was annihilated. But despite the calamity shared by Poland's Jews and non-Jews, anti-Semitic violence did not stop in Poland with the end of the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their Polish hometowns after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in Kielce, Poland, a year after the war ended. Jan Gross' "Fear" is a detailed reconstruction of this pogrom and the Polish reactions to it that attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? Gross argues that postwar Polish anti-Semitism cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society filled with people who had participated in the Nazi campaign of murder and plunder, people for whom Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz said that Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state. For more than half a century, what happened to Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Gross at last brings the truth to light.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. "Jews, Germans, and Allies" draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender - the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality - in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. "Jews, Germans, and Allies" shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany, and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

In this pathbreaking study, Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, many contemporary writers grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. By speaking about or even as the dead, these poets tell what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. This moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril. Susan Gubar is Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University. Her two most recent publications are "Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture" and "Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century".

This deeply imaginative and wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. Ruth HaCohen focuses her study on a 'musical libel' - a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his 'harmonious musicality'.

In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, HaCohen covers a wide swathe of western cultural history, showing how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations. Ruth HaCohen combines in her comprehensive analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish 'noise' and idealized Christian 'harmony' and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Nazi Germany and beyond.
She concludes her book with a passionate and moving argument for humanizing contemporary soundspaces.

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But after World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. Sarah Hammerschlag explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jew's rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, Hammerschlag ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms. Both an intellectual history and a philosophical argument, "The Figural Jew" will set the agenda for all further consideration of Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought, and continental philosophy.

Sensationalizing the Jewish Question. Anti-semitic Trials and the Press in the Early German Empire

Historians have generally assumed that the French Dreyfus Affair had no counterpart in turn-of-the-century Germany. However, while no single anti-Semitic trial in Germany had the social and political impact of the Dreyfus Affair, a series of sensational court cases did have a significant influence on the growth and development of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. These trials, which included prominent libel cases and several ritual murder accusations, frequently spurred debates in the German press about the nature of Judaism and the role and influence of Jews in German society. This book examines the nature of these anti-Semitic affairs, assesses their role in German politics, and evaluates their effect on the overall development of German anti-Semitism.

Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the 'Axis Broadcasts in Arabic' radio programmes, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.

Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.

Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.

The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.

Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.

The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

First published in 1961, Raul Hilberg's comprehensive account of how Germany annihilated the Jewish community of Europe spurred discussion, galvanized further research, and shaped the entire field of Holocaust studies. This revised and expanded edition of Hilberg's classic work extends the scope of his study and includes 80,000 words of new material, particularly from archives in Eastern Europe, added over a lifetime of research. It is the definitive work of a scholar who has devoted more than 50 years to exploring and analyzing the realities of the Holocaust. Spanning the 12-year period of anti-Jewish actions from 1933 to 1945, Hilberg's study encompasses Germany and all the territories under German rule or influence. Its principal focus is on the large number of perpetrators - civil servants, military personnel, Nazi party functionaries, SS men, and representatives of private enterprises - in the machinery of death.

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II - yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore - but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

Under the Third Reich, Nazi Germany undertook an unprecedented effort to refashion the city of Lodz. Home to prewar Poland's second most populous Jewish community, this was to become a German city of enchantment - a modern, clean, and orderly showcase of urban planning and the arts. Central to the undertaking, however, was a crime of unparalleled dimension: the ghettoization, exploitation, and ultimate annihilation of the city's entire Jewish population. "Ghettostadt" is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto's place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Lodz's beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto's affairs, and the 'ordinary' inhabitants of the once Polish city. Gordon Horwitz reveals patterns of exchange, interactions, and interdependence within the city that are stunning in their extent and intimacy. He shows how the Nazis, exercising unbounded force and deception, exploited Jewish institutional traditions, social divisions, faith in rationality, and hope for survival to achieve their wider goal of Jewish elimination from the city and the world. With unusual narrative force, the work brings to light the crushing moral dilemmas facing one of the most significant Jewish communities of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring the ideological underpinnings and cultural, economic, and social realities within which the Holocaust took shape and flourished. This lucid, powerful, and harrowing account of the daily life of the 'new' German city, both within and beyond the ghetto of Lodz, is an extraordinary revelation of the making of the Holocaust.

At the doorstep of the twenty-first century, one would expect that medieval concepts such as blood libel - the accusation that Jews kill children to use their blood in religious ritual - would have been discarded by any civilized human being. Certainly in the Christian world, where the story originated and endured for centuries, modern attitudes have nearly erased these barbaric accusations. But in Arab and Islamic worlds, where enmity towards Israel and Zionism has conditioned beliefs, attitudes, positions, and fantasies, blood libel and similar charges are still part of life.

Most people are unaware of the history of blood libel and do not perceive links between it and many of the false accusations currently hurled against the state of Israel. Raphael Israeli argues that individuals and organizations guilty of human rights crimes project crimes onto Israel to avoid awareness of their own guilt. Certainly when countries ruled by dictators set the agenda of the UN Council for human rights, Israel is consistently censured and condemned.

Accusations of 'apartheid' and charges of discrimination against Muslims are frequently made. Israel is accused of plots against Muslims in order to harm their productive sectors, of using weapons of mass destruction to commit 'genocide' against Arabs, of injecting poisonous substances into Palestinian children, of poisoning Arab lands under the guise of 'agricultural aid', and of laying siege to peaceful citizens. All of these charges are derivatives of blood libel and have been adopted by Middle East Jihadists in their struggle against Israel. This volume aims to explain the origins of the charge of blood libel and define the ways its derivatives have achieved acceptance in certain parts of the world today.

'Two refugees among tens of thousands, two droplets in a sea of hardship: Italians fleeing fascism, Germans fleeing Nazism, German and Eastern European Jews driven out of their countries...
Who were my grandparents? Jewish immigrants, like so many others. They lived on Rue du Pressoir, between Menilmontant and Belleville, in the heart of working-class Paris where so many of the foreign-born resided. Earned a living doing odd jobs. Had two children, a girl, Suzanne, born in January 1939, and a boy, Marcel, born in April 1940. What else do I have, apart from these mundane details?'

Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began. When he set out to uncover their story, he had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind but two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport.

Jablonka's challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. To write this book, he traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited.

A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Mates and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.

Ivan Jablonka is Professor of Contemporary History at the University Paris 13, France, and Editor-in-Chief of La Vie des idees/Books and Ideas. This book, first published in French, won the 2012 Prix du Senat du livre d'histoire, Prix Guizot de l'Academie francaise, and the Prix Augustin-Thierry des Rendez-Vous de l'Histoire de Blois.

Trials of the Diaspora presents the long and troubling history of anti-Semitism in England, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century. Anthony Julius identifies four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism, which he then investigates in detail. The first is the anti-Semitism of medieval England, a radical prejudice of defamation, expropriation, and murder, which culminated in 1290, the year of Edward I's expulsion of the Jews from England, after which there were no Jews left to torment. The second major strand is literary anti-Semitism: an anti-Semitic account of Jews continuously reappearing in English literature, from the anonymous medieval ballad "Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter" through Shakespeare to Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, and beyond. Thirdly, Julius addresses modern anti-Semitism, a quotidian anti-Semitism of insult and partial exclusion, pervasive but contained, experienced by Jews from their 'readmission' to England in the mid-17th century through to the late 20th century. The final chapters then deal with contemporary anti-Semitism, a new configuration of anti-Zionisms, emerging in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises. It is this final perspective which, in Julius's opinion, now constitutes the greatest threat to Anglo-Jewish security and morale. This book, the first history of its kind, has already provoked much comment and debate in its hardback edition, coming as a timely reminder that English culture has been in no way immune to anti-Semitism - and in certain ways is still not to this day. The paperback edition now includes a new preface by the author and a conclusion delineating the main categories of anti-Semitic prejudice.

Trials of the Diaspora is a ground-breaking book that offers the first ever comprehensive history of anti-Semitism in England. Anthony Julius identifies four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism, which he then proceeds to investigate in detail. The first is the anti-Semitism of medieval England, a radical prejudice of defamation, expropriation, and murder, which culminated in 1290, the year of Edward I's expulsion of the Jews from England, after which there were no Jews left to torment. The second major strand is literary anti-Semitism: an anti-Semitic account of Jews continuously present in the discourse of English literature, from the anonymous medieval ballad "Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter" through Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and beyond. Thirdly, Julius addresses modern anti-Semitism, a quotidian anti-Semitism of insult and partial exclusion, pervasive but contained, experienced by Jews from their "readmission" to England in the mid-17th century through to the late 20th century. The final chapters then deal with contemporary anti-Semitism, a new configuration of anti-Zionisms, emerging in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises. It is this final perspective which, in Julius's opinion, now constitutes the greatest threat to Anglo-Jewish security and morale. This book, the first history of its kind, is sure to provoke much comment and debate, and comes as a timely reminder that English culture has been in no way immune to anti-Semitism - and in certain ways is still not to this day.

A collection honoring Elie Wiesel's seventieth birthday. Based on a three-day symposium, The Claims of Memory, this volume conveys the omnipresence of memory in Elie Wiesel's writing and attempts to preserve the flavor of the exchange that took place. It represents several intersecting approaches to memory: the nature of memoir writing; an analysis of contrasting dimensions of memory in victims and persecutors; the ethics of memory; and chronicling of the memory of God through key texts in Christian and Jewish traditions.

The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil. "The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology" brings together a distinguished array of senior scholars - many of whose work is available here in English for the first time - to consider key topics ranging from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the destruction of European Jewry and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust.

This volume presents a wide-ranging selection of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. It will be the most complete anthology of its sort, bringing together for the first time: (1) a large sample of ultra-orthodox writings, translated from the Hebrew and Yiddish; (2) a substantial selection of essays by Israeli authors, also translated from the Hebrew; (3) a broad sampling of works written in English by American and European authors. These diverse selections represent virtually every significant theological position that has been articulated by a Jewish thinker in response to the Holocaust. Included are rarely studied responses that were written while the Holocaust was happening.

From the Protocols of Zion of the Elders of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials. Challenging the Media, Law and the Acadamy

Reacting to the Irving / Lipstadt trial, the editors of this volume sought to use this latest trial as a catalyst to investigate the larger question that arose from what is now a century of invective and defense: how do we determine the truth claims made for (or by, or against) the Holocaust in various media from outright forgeries like the "Protocols of the 'Elders of Zion'" to negationist literature to the legal trials held to adjudicate such claims. In this series of short essays, each author explores the methods and assumptions within their disciplines that frame the way in which we come to understand the racism and anti-Semitism which rest beneath Holocaust denial. As teachers of college and graduate courses on the Holocaust, faced with proliferating print and web based assertions and re-assertions of premises whose veracity had long since been disproved (e.g., Protocols of Zion), we feel it important to provide our students and colleagues with a text that would step back from the Holocaust itself to the broader question: why do these invectives persist despite legal verdicts, historical renunciation and "objective" reporting. In this manner, as part of their study of specific Holocaust related issues, students could confront the methods by which assertions related to the fate of Jews in the Twentieth Century have been asserted, struggled over, and fixed in the law, in historical canon, and in the popular imagination. By focusing on those moments when the truth claims of those assertions are subjected to public tests, such as the trials we focus upon in this volume, we can serve this larger purpose.

Film and the Holocaust. New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films

This is a sweeping survey of how global filmmakers have treated the subject of the Holocaust. When representing the Holocaust, the slightest hint of narrative embellishment strikes contemporary audiences as somehow a violation against those who suffered under the Nazis. This anxiety is, at least in part, rooted in Theodor Adorno's dictum that 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric'. And despite the fact that he later reversed his position, the conservative opposition to all 'artistic' representations of the Holocaust remains powerful, leading to the insistent demand that it be represented, as it really was. And yet, whether it's the girl in the red dress or a German soldier belting out Bach on a piano during the purge of the ghetto in "Schindler's List", or the use of tracking shots in the documentaries "Shoah" and "Night and Fog", all genres invent or otherwise embellish the narrative to locate meaning in an event that we commonly refer to as 'unimaginable'. This wide-ranging book surveys and discusses the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in cinema, covering a deep cross-section of both national cinemas and genres.

For the first time, Etty Hillesum's diary and letters appear together to give us the fullest possible portrait of this extraordinary woman. In the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance. The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his university post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. From 1933 to 1935, Klemperer kept detailed diaries, which contain in note form some of the raw material for the German edition of "LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii". First published in 1957, "The Language of the Third Reich" arose from Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism.' This brilliant book is by turns entertaining and profound, saddening and horrifying. It is deservedly one of the great twentieth-century studies of language and its engagement with history.

The Sons of Pigs and Apes. Muslim Anti-semitism and the Conspiracy of Silence

In this book the author wants to establish that anti-Semitism exists today not only among Islamist extremists but also among more moderate Muslims. It explains the supposed reluctance in the West to discuss this disturbing trend. It offers suggestions for healing the rift between Muslims and Jews.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, antisemitism everywhere seemed to be on the wane. But as Neil Kressel claims in this book, the Muslim world has resurrected in recent decades almost every diatribe that more than two millennia of European hostility produced against the Jews, and it has introduced many homegrown and novel modes of attack. Though it is impossible to determine precisely how many of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims hold anti-Jewish beliefs, Kressel finds that much bigotry comes from the highest levels of religious and political leadership.

Compounding the problem, as Kressel sees it, many in the West refuse to recognize this issue. The author claims that the growing epidemic of hate has been largely ignored, misunderstood, or downplayed, because of apathy, ignorance, confusion, bigotry, ideology, purported pragmatism, and misguided multiculturalism. Those who value human rights ignore antisemitism at their own risk, he cautions, noting that no antisemitic regime or movement has ever been otherwise reasonable or progressive.

Kressel argues that Muslim antisemitism provides an acid test of the seriousness of Western liberalism. If the West fails to stem this growing tide, as now seems likely, future affairs will not go well for the true proponents of democracy. Kressel moves beyond sounding the alarm to explore the diverse religious, political, social, and psychological forces that have created and nurtured the new hostility to Jews in the Muslim world; he concludes with a bold and clear plan for what must be done to confront this hostility.

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and the Jews. Perspectives from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' both honours and carries on the work of The Rev. Dr. James Parkes (1896-1981), a pioneer in the many different fields involving the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The collection is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes' life work in relation to tolerance and intolerance. From antiquity to today, Jews have often been defined as 'aliens'; these essays consider the effects of such legislative and socio-cultural exclusion on the self-definition of the dominant society. Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' employs an interdisciplinary framework, bringing together the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and Israel, who work in history, theology, political philosophy, legal theory and literary studies. Eminent historians and theorists of tolerance and intolerance, including Gavin Langmuir, David Theo Goldberg, Norman Solomon and Tony Kushner, are joined by younger scholars researching new developments in the field, van euro 91.00

In this new volume, Langer - one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation - assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film "Life Is Beautiful", the uncritical acclaim of "Fragments", the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the "Old Testament" by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.

The Changing Face of Anti-semitism. From Ancient Times to the Present Day

For thirty years the director of the Wiener Library in London, the leading institute for the study of anti-Semitism, Walter Laqueur here offers both a comprehensive history of anti-Semitism as well as an illuminating look at the newest wave of this phenomenon. Laqueur begins with an invaluable historical account of this pernicious problem, tracing the evolution from a predominantly religious anti-Semitism--stretching back to the middle ages--to a racial anti-Semitism that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author then uses this historical account as backdrop to a brilliant analysis of the newest species of anti-Semitism, explaining its origins and rationale, how it manifests itself, in what ways and why it is different from anti-Semitism in past ages, and what forms it may take in the future. The book reveals that what was historically a preoccupation of Christian and right-wing movements has become in our time even more frequent among Muslims and left-wing groups. Moreover, Laqueur argues that we can't simply equate this new anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and write it off as merely anti-Israel sentiments. National and religious minority groups have been systematically persecuted from Indonesia, to Bangladesh, Rwanda, and beyond, but their fate has not generated much indignation in Europe and America. If Israel alone is singled out for heated condemnation, is the root of this reaction simply anti-Zionism or is it anti-Semitism? Here is both a summing up of the entire trajectory of anti-Semitism--the first comprehensive history of its kind--and an exploration of the new wave of anti-Semitism that will be of interest to all concerned about the future of Jews, Judaism, and Israel.

Buried by the Times. The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper

An in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-45. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history's worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times' Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America, all led The Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler's 'final solution' was hidden from readers and - because of the newspaper's influence on other media - from America at large. Buried by The Times is required reading for anyone interested in America's response to the Holocaust and for anyone curious about how journalists determine what is newsworthy.

Immediately following his release from Auschwitz in 1945, Primo Levi, along with Dr Claudio Debenedetti, was asked to provide a report on living conditions in the concentration camp for Russian authorities. Published the following year, it was then forgotten and has until now remained unknown to a wider public. Representing the very first attempts at fathoming the horrors, the report details the deportation to Auschwitz, selections for work and extermination, everyday life in the camp, and the organization and operation of the gas chambers. "Auschwitz Report" is a significant addition to the oeuvre of the world's most renowned chronicler of the Holocaust.

In "The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age", Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider examine the distinctive forms that collective memory take in the age of globalisation. Levy and Sznaider examine the way the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel, and the US during the last fifty years, and show how this singular event has been detached from its precise context and instead used as a way of focusing abstract questions of good and evil, and how this use has given the Holocaust a resonance across the global stage, as responses to other injustices like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia have depended on a collective understanding of the Holocaust to justify such actions. In so doing, memories of this singularly tragic event as articulated in our global age open up new possibilities for imagining global political and cultural norms for the effective spread of human rights and for corrected injustices around the globe.

Antisemitism: A History offers a readable overview of a daunting topic, describing and analyzing the hatred that Jews have faced from ancient times to the present. The essays contained in this volume provide an ideal introduction to the history and nature of antisemitism, stressing readability, balance, and thematic coherence, while trying to gain some distance from the polemics and apologetics that so often cloud the subject. Chapters have been written by leading scholars in the field and take into account the most important new developments in their areas of expertise. Collectively, the chapters cover the whole history of antisemitism, from the ancient Mediterranean and the pre-Christian era, through the Medieval and Early Modern periods, to the Enlightenment and beyond. The later chapters focus on the history of antisemitism by region, looking at France, the English-speaking world, Russia and the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Nazi Germany, with contributions too on the phenomenon in the Arab world, both before and after the foundation of Israel. Contributors grapple with the use and abuse of the term 'antisemitism', which was first coined in the mid-nineteenth century but which has since gathered a range of obscure connotations and confusingly different definitions, often applied retrospectively to historically distant periods and vastly dissimilar phenomena. Of course, as this book shows, hostility to Jews dates to biblical periods, but the nature of that hostility and the many purposes to which it has been put have varied over time and often been mixed with admiration - a situation which continues in the twenty-first century.

Based on years of research conducted mostly in Arabic sources, Meir Litvak and Ester Webman track the evolution of post-World War II perceptions of the Holocaust and their parallel emergence in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust became entangled with broader anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiments. Litvak and Webman track this discourse through the work of leading intellectuals and turn to representations of the Holocaust in the media and culture of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and among the Palestinian people. Their chronological history, which spans sixty years, provides a remarkable perspective on the origins, development, and tenaciousness of anti-Holocaust belief.

A comprehensive history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, paying detailed attention to an unrivalled range sources. Focusing clearly on the perpetrators and exploring closely the process of decision making, Longerich argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses, but that anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule - and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions, from their earliest days in power through to the invasion of the Soviet Union and the Final Solution. As Longerich shows, the 'disappearance' of Jews was designed as a first step towards a racially homogeneous society - first within the 'Reich', later in the whole of a German-dominated Europe.

The subject of anti-Semitism, not long ago thought to be a dead issue, has been revised due to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Maccoby traces the now topical discussion of the origins of Anti-Semitism, and especially its development in the modern world. The key questions that are addressed include: How is it that this medieval prejudice proved so lasting and potent? Are the roots of anti-Semitism religious? If so, how do these roots differ in Christianity and Islam? By what means did it bridge the gap between medievalism and Enlightenment? How was it that many of the most respected Enlightenment figures (such as Voltaire) dedicated as they were to tolerance and pluralism, retained a virulent anti-Semitism? These questions, and many more, are dealt with as Maccoby explores the roots of the anti-Semitism, tracing it from its origins, and shows how it has changed in accordance with the shifting ideas of the modern world but without changing in its essence. Antisemitism and Modernity is essential reading for those with interests in the development of anti-Semitism, its manifestation in the current world and its future.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization.

Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and Francois Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens.

In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

Maud Mandel is associate professor of Judaic studies and history and director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France.

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor. Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholarship aims to challenge memory and fill its gaps. At the same time, scholars often use testimonies uncritically or selectively--mining them to support generalizations. This book is a departure, bringing several scholars together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp. They moved to New York in the 1960s. Since the end of the war, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Zippi's testimony covers a wide range of human experiences in extremis and spans fifty-odd years. It is thus uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know, sixty years after the Nazi era, about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims and pitfalls of story-telling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book, written by established Holocaust scholars who have known Helen Tichauer for years, attempts to approximate survivor testimony and probe the limits of its representation and understanding. Contributors include Atina Grossmann, Konrad Kwiet, Wendy Lower and Nehama Tec

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, Vol 1, Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps Under the SS-business Administration Main Office (WVHA)

Created by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the monumental 7-volume encyclopaedia that the present work inaugurates will make available - in one place for the first time - detailed information about the universe of camps, sub-camps, and ghettos established and operated by the Nazis - altogether some 20,000 sites, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. This volume covers three groups of camps: the early camps established in the first year of Hitler's rule, the major concentration camps with their constellations of sub-camps that operated under the control of the SS-Business Administration Main Office, and youth camps. Overview essays precede entries on individual camps and sub-camps. Each entry provides basic information about the purpose of the site; the prisoners, guards, working and living conditions; and key events in its history. Material drawn from personal testimonies helps convey the character of each site, while source citations for each entry provide a path to additional information.

This volume offers a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German administrative regions. Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto's liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites--previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust--make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean are applied research scholars at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

After the Holocaust, the empty, silent spaces of bombed-out synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish districts were all that was left in many German and Polish cities with prewar histories rich in the sights and sounds of Jewish life. What happened to this scarred landscape after the war, and how have Germans, Poles, and Jews encountered these ruins over the past sixty years? In the postwar period, city officials swept away many sites, despite protests from Jewish leaders. But in the late 1970s church groups, local residents, political dissidents, and tourists demanded the preservation of the few ruins still standing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this desire to preserve and restore has grown stronger. In one of the most striking and little-studied shifts in postwar European history, the traces of a long-neglected Jewish past have gradually been recovered, thanks to the rise of heritage tourism, nostalgia for ruins, international discussions about the Holocaust, and a pervasive longing for cosmopolitanism in a globalizing world. Examining this transformation from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Michael Meng finds no divided memory along West-East lines, but rather a shared memory of tensions and paradoxes that crosses borders throughout Central Europe. His narrative reveals the changing dynamics of the local and the transnational, as Germans, Poles, Americans, and Israelis confront a built environment that is inevitably altered with the passage of time. Shattered Spaces exemplifies urban history at its best, uncovering a surprising and moving postwar story of broad contemporary interest.4373 AB

Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany's oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With "Jews in Nazi Berlin", those individual lives - and the constant struggle they required - come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a persecuted people. Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of "Jews in Nazi Berlin" have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime's power. The book's essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement - and, importantly, to humanize - the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increased brutality of the regime. A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, "Jews in Nazi Berlin" renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.

The term 'antisemitism' was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879. Marr's secular, political racism existed inconsistently alongside his religious anti-Semitism. His self-proclaimed goal was 'to free Christianity from the yoke of Judaism.' While the term might not have existed before the 19th century, the persecution of the Jewish people dates back more than three thousand years. The Dictionary of Antisemitism is the first and only dictionary ever published that is dedicated solely to this subject. Spanning 3,000 years of antagonism to Jews, the dictionary details not only 'the longest hatred,' but also the most widespread, covering the five major continents. A comprehensive scholarly introduction discusses the definitions, causes, and varieties of antisemitism before the dictionary gets into the specifics. The dictionary section itself contains 2,500 entries, ranging from 'Aaron of Lincoln' to 'Zyklon.' Entries can be found on all forms of antisemitism, such as ancient, medieval, and modern antisemitism; pagan, Christian, and Muslim antisemitism; and religious, economic, psychosocial, racial, cultural, and political antisemitism. This essential dictionary provides comprehensive coverage on this compelling subject, and as such, it will remain important for years to come.

Survivors. Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe

Survivors is the first examination of how more than half of the Jews in Western Europe survived the Holocaust. The widely differing rates of Jewish mortality have long vexed historians, who have traditionally concentrated on explaining this problem through national studies or by using a comparative approach, concentrating on the role of perpetrators, victims, and circumstances. In contrast, Survivors emphasizes the factors that helped Jews to avoid deportation, either through escape or by going underground. Taken as a whole, it book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish survival in Western Europe in all its forms. Firstly, the book focuses on the escape routes used by Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and the disparate networks that ran them, including the routes from France into Spain and Switzerland, but also the lesser know history of the escape of Norwegian Jewry and the famous rescue from Denmark in 1943. The second half of the book is devoted to three national case studies (France, Belgium, and the Netherlands) that focus on the interrelationship between Jewish self-help and the individuals and organizations that assisted in hiding them, including the Christian churches. These case studies serve to highlight the very different circumstances and structures pertaining in these three countries and how this had a direct bearing on levels of survival. Separate chapters then deal with the case of child rescue and the motivations of those involved in this most contentious of issues. Finally, the spotlight is turned on cases where Jews were saved, either directly or indirectly, by the Nazis themselves - and on the vexed question of Jews who survived by collaborating with the arrest and deportation of their co-religionists.

This 2008 book is a study of the ideological and political relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in modern Germany, from the nineteenth century through the Third Reich, focusing on the years between 1933 and 1942. It considers three contentious issues in post-Holocaust historiography and debate: the nature of modern German anti-Semitism; the decision-making process leading to the Nazi mass murder of the Jews of Europe; and the nature and role of German Zionism in German-Jewish history before the Holocaust. This study sheds more light on both the ideological and practical assault of German anti-Semitism and Nazi Jewish policy on the Jews of Central Europe, as well as the ideological and political response of some German Jews, the Zionists, to that assault. It concludes that the attitudes and policies of German anti-Semitism and National Socialism toward Zionism reflect a relatively consistent ideology that was applied in an inconsistent and contradictory manner.

Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler's regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

Inventing the Jew. Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian & other Central-East European Cultures

"Inventing the Jew" follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures (legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations) to that of 'high' cultures (literature, essays, press writings, and socio-political literature), showing how motifs specific to 'folkloric antisemitism' migrated to 'intellectual antisemitism'. This comparative perspective also highlights how the images of Jews have differed from that of other 'strangers' such as Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. The gap between the conception of the 'imaginary Jew' and the 'real Jew' is a cultural distance that differs over time and place, here seen through the lens of cultural anthropology. Stereotypes of the 'generic Jew' were not exclusively negative, and are described in chapters on the physical and professional portrait, the moral and intellectual, the magic and mythological, and religious images.

Based on extensive scrutiny of primary sources from Nazi and Jihadist ideologues, David Patterson argues that Jihadist anti-Semitism stems from Nazi ideology. This book challenges the idea that Jihadist anti-Semitism has medieval roots, identifying its distinctively modern characteristics and tracing interconnections that link the Nazis to the Muslim Brotherhood to the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Sudan, the Iranian Islamic Republic, and other groups with an anti-Semitic worldview. Based on his close reading of numerous Jihadist texts, Patterson critiques their antisemitic teachings and affirms the importance of Jewish teaching, concluding that humanity needs the very Jewish teaching and testimony that the Jihadists advocate destroying.

Open Wounds. The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

In this book, David Patterson sets out to describe why Jews must live - but especially think - in a way that is distinctly Jewish. For Patterson, the primary responsibility of post-Holocaust Jewish thought is to avoid thinking in the same categories that led to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people. The Nazis, he says, were not anti- Semitic because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-Semitic, and their anti-Semitism was furthered by a Western ontological tradition that made God irrelevant by placing the thinking ego at the center of being.

Thus the need for a revitalized Jewish thought: It is not only because modern Jewish thought, hoping to accommodate itself to rational idealism, is thereby obliged to put itself in league with postmodernists who 'preach tolerance for everything except biblically based religion, beginning with Judaism', and who effectively call on Jews, as fellow 'citizens of the global village', to disappear. It is also because without the Jewish reality of Jerusalem, there is only the Jewish abstraction of Auschwitz, for in Auschwitz the Jews were murdered not as husbands and wives, parents and children, but as efficiently numbered units.

If the Jews, Patterson claims, are not a people set apart by 'a Voice that is other than human', then the Holocaust can never be understood as evil rather than simply immoral. With Open Wounds, Patterson aims to make possible a religious response to the Holocaust. Post-Holocaust Jewish thinking, confronting the work of healing the world - of tikkun haolam - must recover not just Jewish tradition but also the category of the holy in human beings' thinking about humanity.

Sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, pondering the enormity of that event. This book explores how inquiry about the Holocaust challenges understanding, especially its religious and ethical dimensions. Debates about God's relationship to evil are ancient, but the Holocaust complicated them in ways never before imagined. Its massive destruction left Jews and Christians searching among the ashes to determine what, if anything, could repair the damage done to tradition and to theology.

Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews and Christians have increasingly sought to know how or even whether theological analysis and reflection can aid in comprehending its aftermath. Specifically, Jews and Christians, individually and collectively, find themselves more and more in the position of needing either to rethink theodicy - typically understood as the vindication of divine justice in the face of evil - or to abolish the concept altogether. Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the contributors to "Fire in the Ashes" confront these and other difficult questions about God and evil after the Holocaust. This book - created out of shared concerns and a desire to investigate differences and disagreements between religious traditions and philosophical perspectives - represents an effort to advance meaningful conversation between Jews and Christians and to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intra-faith inquiries.T

Antisemitism is reappearing in disturbing new ways and in unexpected strength. This resurgence is of deep concern to politicians, practitioners of law, the academic community, and to informed citizens everywhere. To address this, a scholarly conference was assembled at the University of Toronto in 2003. Contemporary Antisemitism is the result of that meeting.

Europe is expanding - and therewith remembers its historical basis, which was hidden beneath the shadow of the Cold War for a long time. This return of a common history which is mostly narrated as a history of success today, however contains the perception of transnational traditions at the same time which by contrast should give reason for a critical self-reflection. This volume gives an impulse through a comparative examination of the still highly actual forms of antisemitism in Europe. The focus will be on the developments in the countries from the Baltic States to South Eastern Europe, which usually are little known in Western Europe. At the same time, the specifities of antisemitism in Eastern Europe are incorporated in the theoretical insights of antisemitism research, thus filling a gap that has existed until now.

American Naturalism and the Jews, Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton and Cather

Otherwise known for their progressive social values, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather all also expressed strong anti-Semitic prejudices throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, showing how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture, including such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration.

How should we understand the relation of the Holocaust to the broader historical processes of the century just ended? How do we explain the bearing of the Holocaust on problems of representation, memory, memorialization, and historical practice? These are some of the questions explored by an esteemed group of scholars in Catastrophe and Meaning, the most significant multiauthored book on the Holocaust in over a decade.

This collection features essays that consider the role of anti-Semitism in the recounting of the Holocaust; the place of the catastrophe in the narrative of twentieth-century history; the questions of agency and victimhood that the Holocaust inspires; the afterlife of trauma in literature written about the tragedy; and the gaps in remembrance and comprehension that normal historical works fail to notice.

More than twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, a debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or a suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as a writer and survivor.Many weighed in with thoughtful and sometimes provocative commentary, but the debate over his death has sometimes overshadowed the larger significance of his place as a thinker after Auschwitz.This volume contains essays that deal directly with Levi and his work; others tangentially use Levi's writings or ideas to explore larger issues in Holocaust studies, philosophy, theology, and the problem of representation. They are included here in the spirit that Levi described himself: proud of being impureand a centaur,cognizant that asymmetry is the fundamental structure of organic life. I became a Jew in Auschwitz,Levi once wrote, comparing the concentration camp to a universityof life. Yet he could also paradoxically admit, in an interview late in life, There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.Rather than seek to untangle these contradictions, Levi embraced them. This volume seeks to embrace them as well.

Over the last several decades, videotestimony with aging Holocaust survivors has brought these witnesses into the limelight. Yet the success of these projects has made it seem that little survivor testimony took place in earlier years. In truth, thousands of survivors began to recount their experience at the earliest opportunity. This book provides the first full-length case study of early postwar Holocaust testimony, focusing on David Boder's 1946 displaced persons interview project. In July 1946, Boder, a psychologist, traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps and what he called "shelter houses." During his nine weeks in Europe, Boder carried out approximately 130 interviews in nine languages and recorded them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. Likely the earliest audio recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors, the interviews are today the earliest extant recordings, valuable for the spoken word (that of the DP narrators and of Boder himself) and also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder wire recorded at various points through the expedition. Eighty were eventually transcribed into English, most of which were included in a self-published manuscript of more than 3,100 pages. Rosen sets Boder's project in the context of the postwar response to displaced persons, sketches the dramatic background of his previous life and work, chronicles in detail the evolving process of interviewing both Jewish and non-Jewish DPs, and examines from several angles the implications for the history of Holocaust testimony.

In this provocative work, Alvin H. Rosenfeld contends that the proliferation of books, films, television programs, museums, and public commemorations related to the Holocaust has, perversely, brought about a diminution of its meaning and a denigration of its memory. Investigating a wide range of events and cultural phenomena, such as Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the distortions of Anne Frank's story, and the ways in which the Holocaust has been depicted by such artists and filmmakers as Judy Chicago and Steven Spielberg, Rosenfeld charts the cultural forces that have minimized the Holocaust in popular perceptions. He contrasts these with sobering representations by Holocaust witnesses such as Jean Amery, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertesz. The book concludes with a powerful warning about the possible consequences of "the end of the Holocaust" in public consciousness.

Often overshadowed by the persecution of Jews in Germany, the treatment of Jews in fascist Italy comes into sharp focus in this volume by Italian historian Michele Sarfatti. Using thorough and careful statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial, Sarfatti begins with a history of Italian Jews in the decades before fascism—when Jews were fully integrated into Italian national life—and provides a deft and comprehensive history from fascism's rise in 1922 to its defeat in 1945.

Retrieved after World War II from metal boxes and milk cans buried beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the "Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive" was clandestinely compiled between 1940 and 1942 under the leadership of historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Members of the secret Oyneg Shabes organization gathered thousands of testimonies from natives of Warsaw and refugees from hundreds of other localities, creating a documentary record of the wartime fate of Polish Jewry. Now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the archive comprises some 35,000 pages, including documents, materials from the underground press, photographs, memoirs, belles lettres, and much more. This first comprehensive description of its contents is meticulously indexed to facilitate location of documents and information. By aiding access to this unique archival treasure, the catalogue and guide advance study of the daily lives, struggles, and sufferings of Polish Jews at a crucial time and place in the history of the Holocaust.

Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

"Denying History" takes a bold and in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened and explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not deserve a response, historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the minds and culture of these Holocaust 'revisionists'. In the process, they show how we can be certain that the Holocaust happened and, for that matter, how we can confirm any historical event. This edition is expanded with a new chapter and epilogue examining current, shockingly mainstream revisionism.

On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, fatally shot a German diplomat in Paris. Within three days anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany, initially incited by local Nazi officials, and ultimately sanctioned by the decisions of Hitler and Goebbels at the pinnacle of the Third Reich. As synagogues burned and Jews were beaten in the streets, police stood aside. Men, women, and children - many neighbors of the victims - participated enthusiastically in acts of violence, rituals of humiliation, and looting. By the night of November 10, a nationwide antisemitic pogrom had inflicted massive destruction on synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish-owned businesses. During and after this spasm of violence and plunder, 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds would perish in the following months. Kristallnacht revealed to the world the intent and extent of Nazi Judeophobia. However, it was seen essentially as the work of the Nazi leadership. Now, Alan Steinweis counters that view in his vision of Kristallnacht as a veritable pogrom - a popular cathartic convulsion of antisemitic violence that was manipulated from above but executed from below by large numbers of ordinary Germans rioting in the streets, heckling and taunting Jews, cheering Stormtroopers' hostility, and looting Jewish property on a massive scale. Based on original research in the trials of the pogrom's perpetrators and the testimonies of its Jewish survivors, Steinweis brings to light the evidence of mob action by all sectors of the civilian population. "Kristallnacht 1938" reveals the true depth and nature of popular antisemitism in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is one of the most intensively studied phenomena in modern history. The volume of writing that fuels the numerous debates about it is overwhelming in quantity and diversity. Even those who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding the Holocaust cannot assimilate it all. There is, then, an urgent need to synthesize and evaluate the complex historiography on the Holocaust, exploring the major themes and debates relating to it and drawing widely on the findings of a great deal of research. Concentrating on the work of the last two decades, Histories of the Holocaust examines the 'Final Solution' as a European project, the decision-making process, perpetrator research, plunder and collaboration, regional studies, ghettos, camps, race science, antisemitic ideology, and recent debates concerning modernity, organization theory, colonialism, genocide studies, and cultural history. Research on victims is discussed, but Stone focuses more closely on perpetrators, reflecting trends within the historiography, as well as his own view that in order to understand Nazi genocide the emphasis must be on the culture of the perpetrators. The book is not a 'history of the history of the Holocaust', offering simply a description of developments in historiography. Stone critically analyses the literature, discerning major themes and trends and assessing the achievements and shortcomings of the various approaches. He demonstrates that there never can or should be a single history of the Holocaust and facilitates an understanding of the genocide of the Jews from a multiplicity of angles.

The ferocity of the Nazi attack upon the Jews took many by surprise. Volkov argues that a new look at both the nature of antisemitism and at the complexity of modern Jewish life in Germany is required in order to provide an explanation. While antisemitism had a number of functions in pre-Nazi German society, it most particularly served as a cultural code, a sign of belonging to a particular political and cultural milieu. Surprisingly, it only had a limited effect on the lives of the Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, their integration was well advanced. Many of them enjoyed prosperity, prestige, and the pleasures of metropolitan life. This book stresses the dialectical nature of assimilation, the lead of the Jews in the processes of modernization, and, finally, their continuous efforts to 'invent' a modern Judaism that would fit their new social and cultural position.

The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A Century-Old Myth

This book examines the impact of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" across the world since it was compiled in the early 20th century. It explores the tract's successful dissemination and how such a blatant Anti-semitic fabrication is still accepted as true by so many.

In this unprecedented work two decades in the making, leading historian Robert S. Wistrich examines the long and ugly history of anti-Semitism, from the first recorded pogrom in 38 BCE to its shocking and widespread resurgence in the present day. As no other book has done before it, A Lethal Obsession reveals the causes behind this shameful and persistent form of hatred and offers a sobering look at how it may shake and reshape the world in years to come.

Here are the fascinating and long-forgotten roots of the 'Jewish difference' - the violence that greeted the Jewish Diaspora in first-century Alexandria. Wistrich suggests that the idea of a formless God who passed down a universal moral law to a chosen few deeply disconcerted the pagan world. The early leaders of Christianity increased their strength by painting these 'superior' Jews as a cosmic and satanic evil, and by the time of the Crusades, murdering a 'Christ killer' had become an act of conscience.

Moving seamlessly through centuries of war and dissidence, A Lethal Obsession powerfully portrays the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fateful anti-Semitic tract commissioned by Russia's tsarist secret police at the end of the nineteenth century-and the prediction by Theodor Herzl, Austrian founder of political Zionism, of eventual disaster for the Jews in Europe.

Here, in pointed and devastating detail, is our own world, one in which jihadi terrorists and the radical left blame Israel for all global ills. In his concluding chapters, Wistrich warns of a possible nuclear 'Final Solution' at the hands of Iran, a land in which a formerly prosperous Jewish community has declined in both fortunes and freedoms.

The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house - the most visited site in the Netherlands - has become a shrine to the Holocaust. Yet while Anne Frank's story continues to be discussed and analyzed, her experience as a hidden child in wartime Holland is anomalous - as this book brilliantly demonstrates. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Diane L. Wolf paints a compelling portrait of Holocaust survivors whose experiences were often diametrically opposed to the experiences of those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, leading many of those interviewed here to remark, 'My war began after the war.' This first in-depth examination of hidden children vividly brings to life their experiences before, during, and after hiding and analyzes the shifting identities, memories, and family dynamics that marked their lives from childhood through advanced age. Wolf also uncovers anti-Semitism in the policies and practices of the Dutch state and the general population, which historically have been portrayed as relatively benevolent toward Jewish residents. The poignant family histories in "Beyond Anne Frank" demonstrate that we can understand the Holocaust more deeply by focusing on postwar lives.

A daughter struggles to get her mother to talk about her Holocaust experiences, and tries to understand how those experiences have shaped her own life.

What’s it like to spend sixteen months in hiding, crouching in a tiny cellar, during the dark years of World War II? To know that many of your friends and relatives have either been shot or sent to concentration camps? To have your life depend on the humanity of an elderly Christian couple who lets you hide under their floor? What if you knew it had been your mother crouching under that floor? Wouldn’t you wonder how she stood it? How it felt? What it did to her? And how it all affected you? In Hiding Places, Diane Wyshogrod traces the process of discovery and self-discovery as she researched the experiences of her mother, Helen Rosenberg, who as a teenager hid in just such a cellar, in Żółkiew, Poland. The narrative, which moves between New York, pre-war and wartime Poland, and Jerusalem, is based on many hours of recorded interviews and covers Helen’s life before, during, and after World War II.

Although Wyshogrod’s original intention was simply to record her mother’s experiences, piecing the narrative together proved difficult: there were numerous gaps, things her mother could (or would) no longer remember, and other things her daughter just couldn’t comprehend. To fill in these gaps, Wyshogrod draws from all the facets of her identity—writer, clinical psychologist, daughter, mother—in an attempt not only to understand her mother’s experiences, but to find out why it is so important for her (and for us) to make that attempt in the first place.

Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, 2012, geb, 298 pp, € 26.50, 9781438442433

'With simple means, without any 'title,' this book should in distant times always be in your memory.'An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadikow. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezin to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.Marianka Zadikow's album, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a poignant document from the last months of the Holocaust. The words and images inscribed here - by children and grandparents, factory workers and farmhands, professionals and intellectuals, musicians and artists - reflect both joy and trepidation. They include passages of remembered verse, lovingly executed drawings, and hurried farewells on the eve of transport to Auschwitz.Facing-page translations render the book's many languages into English, while historical and biographical notes give details, where known, of the fates of those whose words are recorded here. An introduction by Holocaust scholar Deborah Dwork tells the story of the Terezin camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there. The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives that "The Terezin Album" affords make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care, community, and hope amid darkness.

The Jews of Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 brings to light the Italian-Jewish experience from the start of Mussolini's prime ministership through the end of the Second World War. Challenging the myth of Italian benevolence during the Fascist period, the authors investigate the treatment of Jews by Italians during the Holocaust, and the native versus foreign roots of Italian Fascist anti-Semitism. Each essay in this volume illustrates a different aspect of Italian Jewry under Fascist and Nazi rule. Areas of inquiry include the role of the Catholic Church with special reference to Pope Pius XII, Mussolini's attitude and anti-Jewish policies leading to the onset of the 1938 Italian racial laws, and the Italian popular reactions to anti-Jewish persecution. Included also is an examination of cover images and articles from the Italian racist newspaper La Difesa della Razza intended to lay bare the influence of the Italian media on the general Italian public.